Average transaction fees on Bitcoin have risen above $7, nearly five-fold in two weeks, thanks to a spike in BRC-20 tokens and the increasingly popular Bitcoin NFT Ordinals.
A spike in Bitcoin transactions involving BRC-20 tokens and Bitcoin NFT Ordinals caused congestion on the network, pushing the average fee rate to its highest level in nearly two years.
On May 3, the average fee per transaction on the Bitcoin network rose to $7.25, the highest since July 2021.
With transaction activity also skyrocketing, the total fees on Bitcoin also skyrocketed.
According to Glassnode, Bitcoin’s total transaction fees, paid by users to miners, increased to around 124 BTC (about $3.5 million) on May 3, an increase of 484% over the past 14 days.
Miners who secure and maintain the Bitcoin network are the beneficiaries of the recent increase in BTC transaction fees as they are rewarded with BTC fees for processing user transactions.
Colin Harper, head of content at Luxor Technologies, a Bitcoin mining group, predicts the increased transaction fees currently occurring in the ecosystem to be an anomaly and only a temporary phenomenon, and that transaction fees will soon return to a manageable average.
